Thursday, May 7, 2015

Firestorm Armada: Aquan Fleet Painting Tutorial

Our annual local miniatures convention, MayDay, has come and gone. A successful event, and noteworthy because it always has a big silent auction. This year, I won a lot of Firestorm Armada ships (among some other cool stuff). Among the lot of ships, I found an Aquan fleet. Searching the internet for painting ideas, I found a very cool colour scheme at the workbenchwarriors blog.

I'm not proud...I set about to copy it.

So, starting with the nice resin casts, the first step was to clean off mould lines and give the models a good wash.

Then prime black.

Next, I sprayed on a light coat of ultramarine base.

Then, a little overspray of a medium greenish-blue.

And then a light greenish-blue, just sticking close to the raised areas of the model.

Copying the scheme I found at workbenchwarrirors, I wanted to replicate their idea of a water-surface texture on the models. This meant getting an undulating and light-reflective look from a shallow body of blue water. Appropriate for "Aquans," I suppose. So I started with a wavy spray of light blue-grey.

Then went in and did some brush-work with the light greenish-blue.

Next, another brush pass with light blue-grey to build up the line work.

And a final highlighting pass with a mix of light blue-grey and white.

Next came the OLS pink lighting around the "windows" and engines. This was a progression of sprays with purples and pinks, and a final highlight of very light pink.

I also worked shadows into the panel lines with a blue-black wash. The model was then finished off with some base work. The base was sprayed black, and then some "space clouds" were then added in blue and red. Finally, small star specks in light blue, orange and white were painted on with a very, very tiny brush.

...and the fleet was done.

This was a very quick and fun project. It went fast because many of the stages could be rattled off with the airbrush.

Finally, as I mentioned, we just finished our annual miniatures convention, MayDay. This year, I ran the 3rd Annual MayDay Steamroller for Warmachine. We had 27 players come out for the tournament from Edmonton, Calgary, Red Deer and Grand Prairie. A super-fun time, and lots of good games.